The Thieves of Lake Cumo

The European woman who I reference here, with my minimal Italian catch phrases, and here, in my otherwise harmless effort at ingratiating camaraderie, blocked me for my attempt at middlebrow kindness, and yes, I have been sling-backing twitter long enough to distance myself from over-heating, but still, I meant no harm and was trying to be a kindred spirit.

@Svetulja15 Ciao! Jozanny <___mio mal

😎

— Joanne M Marinelli (@Jozannyme) February 26, 2018

 My archeological dip shits on this account have nothing to do with her, or forming an attempted rapport with those still residing in my generational homeland, and I wish her well, but we cannot always remain immune from such slams. I am not really into Vincent D’Onofrio’s fireside chats with his followers, to utilize him as an example. He seemed a little too into it somehow, with his tweets, and got burned. As a consequence of being made a fool, he turned his social media account over to a manager, and I rather silently went poof: I can conceivably see a day where I can write an essay about Goren and the law’s relationship to disability and crime, but editors were created to give their writers press passes, if I ever get myself out from under this dip shit, piling as it does. D’Onofrio didn’t seem able to manufacture the requisite coolness, whereas I’m in the middle. I can simply be analytical, but still let my hair down now and then, however the “numbers game” of social media twists our heads. I am not the only writer of such unfortunate circumstances. Alessandro Manzoni wound up suffering from a nervous condition after The Betrothed gave us the modern historical novel. Bulgakov is known for one work, and he burned The Master and Margarita, then rewrote it from memory, (I can do no such thing with my works, which Riverside has repeatedly placed at risk.) We cannot all plot a book a year, as Oates does, though I think she has taken “publish or perish” so literally as to have diluted her power, and I simply hate Stephen King, to let the cripple in me be true to herself. King is not the worst fantasist, by far, but most of his output is dreck, and even at his best, his motifs are infantile. The Stand, for a nearly hysterical work about the collapse of civilization in the US, turns out just to be a retelling of the Resurrection through King’s sympathies for white trash working class. I prefer puking to treating him with respect, as I’ve had my fill of white trash mentality of late. Rather than pivot it in on the screw, giving you a two page post, my broken spirit worms its way to bed. We’ll pick up.

It Isn't Simply Trudy Richardson's Dissembling Threats

As a practical matter, I have little idea how to avoid Inglis House and all the implications such regimentation entails. People lose more than freedom in a wheelchair community like it. They lose the right to say no, the right to decline medical torture, like forcible cathereterization, which I'd decline, regardless of chronic incontinence. It takes wealth to avoid such a fate, a huge degree of resources. Few have it, and if Presby starts legal proceedings against me for non-compliance with waiver services, I may be able to give notice and vacate myself, but I'm not going to get very far without sympathizers who have the willingness to buck the system and let me age on my own terms. In this day and age, that's pie in the sky.

No one likes nursing homes, but Inglis is a mad house reminiscent of Anne Sullivan's descriptions to Helen Keller's father, even if the rats are few and far between. The odor of diseased human waste overwhelms visitors, which is why few families stay involved with Inglis's wards, and rely on torturing peers like me to roll the front lines, when there is space enough between the gurneys in the hallways, the maddening number of power chairs outside patient rooms. Mechanics I knew from my own service needs could barely walk through the clutter, and as prejudiced as I claim to be, you certainly cannot care to contemplate what this does to the black paraprofessionals who have to maintain these bodies, day in, day out. They quit, try to deal with bitches like me, or more passive savants on the attendant care model, or use their salaries to go through nursing school to keep eating it, many of them not particularly good at their jobs, indifferent, much like my sister. My family would say I'm terrorized by the prospect. Yes, but this is due to Presby's methods, especially under Trudy's jurisdiction. She has been threatening me since she was a new hire, and her latest tactic was to stress fuck my dying aunt. I'm supposed to just let this roll off me and give it the finger? This is why I'm leaving. Going from point A to point B, with scant pennies.
What happens after that, I cannot say, but my literary tricks, allowing for satirical disruption, sans Bulgakov, are few. Far between. 

Back Again Itinery

I had to reboot over the audio, and have nothing to post really, my legs thick, losing water weight at the end of summer, pondering my fate as I close my fifty fourth year. My father's house cleaner is due to visit to "assess" my unit, and if you want the truth, fuck that, though she sounds totally harmless. I want to leave where I live, despite everything, even the probability that I'm signing my death warrant, and I'm going to ask this woman if she'll help me pack, whatever she assesses, with my aunt and her shrieking ugliness. I'm so sick of people, spinning like weather vanes. My entire family knows full well they hate public housing, but because I'm a cripple, oh, it's good enough for me. I'm tired of Marie. I'm tired of my dead mother's voice, telling me to be reasonable, that I'd love it here, that they give concerts. I'm tired of rationales, trying to defy my own biology, even my lack of social media popularity. I'm infected, indeed, placate twitter with sugared civility, sis a seethe, not that the connections are useless, and some of the disability account holders, perhaps they feel sorry, maybe believing I'd be happier in Sydney, or Estonia. Helpific, last I checked, follows me, but again, what would I do as an emigre in the Baltic states? I logged onto their website, typed a profile, and with no prompts required, feel like a damn fool. I like them though, would undoubtedly be happier with no Africans in sight-- aren't I awful, simply incorrigible? What would they call me? väike fašistlik? How would I get there, with what, especially with Putin's eminent domain issues? Slavs. Damn me if I comprehend their mindset, personality cults, collective dissidents, as it were. I may not get the Menippean aspects of Bulgakov entirely. He is a bit of a puzzle, but even the good doctor knew, how and where we live is rooted in a great deal of vanity and cruelty, and I'd raze every damn government housing authority to rubble if I had the power, which begs the question of what I'd do next, even if I did not create this account to dismantle policies, or even to write about remaining bedridden for the remainder of my life in this tough Southern European body as opposed to deciding it's time. I've scaled back on that discussion, despite recent events. I don't believe in it, never did, but the alternatives in my case are fairly dire, unless, and the unless is what's lacking. People I actually like who would dare not to leave me at the mercy of punishing indigence, and I know it's a lot to ask of those appropriate to my station.

Triumph of the meek?

"Libertarians believe fewer people should vote."-- John Streck

Despite my skills, not everything is in my immediate grasp, and this pertains to Bulgakov. I do not dislike his classic contribution to the Menippean form, but I bookmarked my e-text in place and started over with The Master and Margarita. Dissident voices have reasons why they need to be decoded-- something that the episode Schotty's Struggle points to in dealing with Germany's legacy. The moral lesson here is more complex than it seems, and skirts the edge of our human abyss with as much guts and more subtly than some of my tirades-- but it also points to why I rebelled against Martin Amis in his promotional tour for his Holocaust novel. We make Hitler's rise, and to a lesser extent, Mussolini's, a man who sometimes looked the other way, an exceptional thing, enshrined, as 9/11, in more sybaritic fashion, is memorialized in the US, but fascist extermination only seems to exceed the human capacity for destruction due to the sheer size of its genocide and its mechanization.

And Hitler is nearly a metaphysical intrigue for authors like Amis, and Norman Mailer-- which is really just feeding the machine. If Adolf was a paranoid schizophrenic, this does not explain his Nietzschean will to power, nor the ability to control his brown shirts. He cannot be dissected that way. Leaders and events converge, and there will always be hate crimes. Pause to consider the developmental spectrum, and the extremist anger of my once activist colleagues; even Stephen Hawking wasn't always shielded from the natural inclination for omnivores to exploit the sick. Omnivores are intelligent opportunists.

Bulgakov is a bit of a puzzle. I do not see orthodoxy in his wonderful subversiveness. He trained as a physician, and it shows in his humor and descriptive ease with cadavers. He too understood materialism and was uneasy with it, and seemed to prefer the aspiration toward salvation that hope embodies. My mistake has been my lengthy pauses. I forget the keynote to the disruptions that create the comic tensions in his dissent. Dangerous in some ways. If this is the profile of the Streck I once knew, he might be gratified. I am not in denial about my age, nor physical vulnerability: What I'm fighting is the welfare system. It's hurt me, and I want these viable months I have to myself, until I decide otherwise, not the Department of Public Welfare-- who essentially wants me to assert a declination of services so that my rental agent can then proceed with its next step, which is nonsensical. In six months I might change my mind.

Medicaid, HMO, I assure you, to doctors I am merely a specimen, their protests to the contrary notwithstanding. They stopped me from dying, treated my lungs, signed paperwork. My quality of life? Polite fictions.

Oligarchs

"Snakes don't eat people."-- the incredulous Jennifer Lopez

Luis Llosa may have been offering a homage to Spielberg with Anaconda, but the film was ridiculous, barely lucid in its underlying subtext of preserving the Amazon's mystique. At this point in my life I fail to see why mechanical sharks and snake machines with a malevolent sense of humor shouldn't be made Secretary General of the United Nations, and if I ever get through The Feast of The Goat by Llhosa the novelist, I will have to view the filmmaker's adaptation, and this unwittingly brings me back to my trouble: my literacy fluency has done absolutely nothing for me, not in terms of personal security, and Llhosa has stated to English media repeatedly that he belonged to a Latin American left which thought it could change things. But that seemingly took forever in blue jeans.

Modernism changed literature and left it for dead, which does not mean that content will not continue to be sold as impulse products for consumers, but what has modernism done to the moral glue, the third chimpanzee's empathy? And by that I mean us, culling Jared's title. I have spent my entire life consuming the English novel and science fiction, and only later getting into the subtlety, sheer marvel, of the action taking place on the continent. Stendhal is more than Balzac's equal, and I can only wonder at where Marcel picked up his cues, not quite 100 years later-- but Joyce? If we were to superimpose Ulysses onto the scripts for The Following, aren't we saying that an abstract modality, taken to its absurd forms, makes it easier to clear the way for immolation? And yes, I get the subversive irony of the fact that James Purefoy brings the terminal degree scholar into the ever burgeoning tent of the American serial killer (hello to my internal vengeance driver). Late 20th century cold war thrillers were an early version of this video game mentality, with the real monster being the American operative flipped for money, or the thrill of it.

In the good old days, I would not have feared a Soviet agent. The Soviet agent believed in what Lenin and Stalin bequeathed, but today's Russian thugs lead us back to Bulgakov's ridicule, which doesn't need an apologia for its reductionist, dystopian tendencies. Bulgakov may not be the best counter example for me to use to bolster hostility towards Joycean meta-fictional overlay, because I may hear the jazz in Mikhail's masterpiece, but cannot say he is right about Christian orthodoxy, but unlike Joyce, Bulgakov is empathetic to the need for hope.

I said something stupid in group when some there asked me if I was a grad student. I said we have a lot to blame the Modernists for, in the accusative. Let me put it this way: I doubt Joyce could have foreseen Osama Bin Laden, but I can see what the rise of Al Qaida means when I read the mock epic of this over educated Anglo-Irishman.

Since I had my bowel impaction yesterday, went off schedule, and have to go to the store, I leave you with that questionable lucidity.

Back To Bulgakov Fog

Rufus Gifford, writing the latest Obama For America email, had me fooled for a moment with his subject line, writing to ask my opinion about why I wouldn't want to have dinner with the president (paranoia about the Secret Service blowing my head off as a spastic enemy of the state in well meaning accident, perhaps?), and why I haven't donated, and the answer to that has been here in my journal account all along, although why I continue to receive party line apparatchik missives is another interesting question, when I am wearied of American politics all together, but it helps to keep my eye on the progressives despite the fact that the right offers me no solutions. Some of you probably think I sound like a mild cripple fascist, and maybe I am to some degree, at this point in my life, the poison of an urban backwater in my veins, but for me, it is not, and never was, about ideological purity.

Through my eyes, the political system under which this country operates is broken, whether it is exemplified by the Bush Administration's aggressive tactics against my vulnerability, or Obama's end term easing of that pressure without removing it, or helping me to find a way out of it. Liberty Resources, and my dated inside knowledge of centers, their unnecessary redundancy, my near total lack of family support on top of this, and public housing, is just a microcosm of the destruction of American mobility, if it indeed ever really existed without the engines of our major wars and unspoken racial/caste systems, an apt two paragraph prelude to say I may never quite understand Mikhail Bulgakov's intentions in The Master and Margarita, at least, not beyond its obvious anti-totalitarian aspects, because I do not believe that lack of faith necessarily implies state model sympathy. Indeed, Rushdie uses schizophrenia to attack Islamic fundamentalism in The Satanic Verses the way Bulgakov uses it in inverse fashion to ridicule Stalinism, and I'm on Rushdie's side, against Mohammed.

Bulgakov is dynamic, and his work has a superb comic timing, but I am still in the first third of the book, perplexed, and may need several readings over time, even to understand and accept in his work what I am inclined to reject about Christian superlative hopes in the Blood of the Lamb. I worried a few more pages over my cappellini and fish, still mentally throwing up my hands at the fucking Russian literary greats . With the possible exception of my limited exposure to Tatyana Tolstaya's soft magical realism, the grand-niece of the other great wingnut Tolstoy, they all drive me crazy.